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In this paper we describe a LIDAR‐based navigation approach applied at both the C‐Elrob (European Land Robot Trial) 2007 and the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. At the C‐Elrob 2007 the approach was used without any prior knowledge about the terrain and without global positioning system (GPS). At the Urban Challenge the approach was combined with a GPS‐based path follower. At the core of the method is a set of “tentacles” that represent precalculated trajectories defined in the ego‐centered coordinate space of the vehicle. Similar to an insect's antennae or feelers, they fan out with different curvatures discretizing the basic driving options of the vehicle. We detail how the approach can be used for exploration of unknown environments and how it can be extended to combined GPS path following and obstacle avoidance allowing safe road following in case of GPS offsets. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments like forest or country roads with dynamic objects remains a challenging task, particularly with respect to the perception of the environment using multiple different sensors.The problem has been addressed from both, the computer vision community as well as from researchers working with laser range finding technology, like the Velodyne HDL-64.Since cameras and LIDAR sensors complement one another in terms of color and depth perception, the fusion of both sensors is reasonable in order to provide color images with depth and reflectance information as well as 3D LIDAR point clouds with color information.In this paper we propose a method for sensor synchronization, especially designed for dynamic scenes, a low-level fusion of the data of both sensors and we provide a solution for the occlusion problem that arises in conjunction with different viewpoints of the fusioned sensors. IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium